On Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 01:23:03PM +0100, J??r??me Marant wrote:
> For instance, how does shipping Emacs with verbatim essays from RMS, the GNU
> Manifesto, and any other stuffs like that makes it non-free? Will removing
> them make Debian more free? I doubt anyone is going to convince me of this,
> despite the interpretation of the SC.
Shipping those verbatim essays wouldn't be a major problem, IMO;
adding a loophole to ship _any_ verbatim essay would be -- we're about
free software, so while we might want to make an exception for verbatim
essays that happen to be important to that goal in an historical sense,
there's no benefit to us of having an exception so large that we start
distributing verbatim essays on anything and everything.
If we /were/ to have such a limited exception, we'd also want it to be
one we could change our minds on. If we distribute "funding free software"
as a useful text today, we might change our minds in a decade and decide
that it isn't actually all that relevant, and isn't even an important
document in the history of free software, and want to remove it.
Which is fine if it's a separate document we made an exception for, but if
it's an irremovable part of our compiler manual, we're stuck. And worse,
we've just spent ten years encouraging people to provide improvements
to that compile manual, so if we want to revert to an earlier version
that didn't have that text, we've also lost all those changes.
In any event, if we were to make an exception for documents that were
important to free software, hiding them away in the emacs package -- or
for that matter, in the gcc info page -- is a really daft way of doing it.
Cheers,
aj